Fear

Fear. Is anything more utterly pervasive in human life than fear?

I myself am afraid of so many things: cockroaches, snakes, rats, loneliness, darkness, failure, old age, pain, broken promises, insignificance, death. I'm afraid of drowning, of fire, of flash floods, of clowns, of being laughed at. I'm afraid of poverty and sickness, of graveyards and ghosts. I'm afraid of sorrow and torture and crime and loss. 

How do we go on with so much fear in our lives? How do we manage to get up every day, look the possibility of dying gruesome deaths in the eye, and still walk out our front doors to go to school or work? How is it that we don't all spend our days hiding under our blankets or cowering in corners? For the most part, it's survival. We are able to get up every morning unafraid because we have to, for instance, feed our families. We have to keep a roof over their heads and put clothes on their backs. Human survival necessitates control of fear. 

But there are times in life when we are unable to merely ignore fear. There are times when its presence is a choking cloud of smoke that makes it impossible to breathe, much less move forward. When we find ourselves opening our eyes to a pitch black room with a garbled sense of time and space, when we are lost, when our security is threatened, when we see ourselves age, when we lose a job or a pet or a loved one... these are the times when survival instinct gives way to a choice of either insanity or courage. 

What will you choose? When you're down in the dumps, when you're back to square one, when you're alone, or penniless, or... wherever you're at, whatever face of fear you're looking at at this very moment... will you decide to give up the fight and essentially lose a part of what makes you you and human? Or will you square your shoulders and fight back? 

Courage, a man in a chick flick once said, is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. 

We march on.